


Brisance

by Lovejoy



Category: Naruto
Genre: Dead Enemies Team Up To Pull A Jailbreak From The Afterlife, Gen, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-07 01:26:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20301163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lovejoy/pseuds/Lovejoy
Summary: Itachi and Deidara escape from the afterlife.





	Brisance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_rck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/gifts).

> Let's just... pretend magic ninja magic makes sense.

“_You,_” Deidara snarls. “The hell do _you_ want?”

Itachi is standing there, the blurry form of him like a pale, cloaked shadow, his edges billowing. The mere sight of his eyes, red, fixed points, incites Deidara to fury: the thought of killing him, of beating him, exploding those sickening, judging eyes right out of his head is close behind.

Shame they’re both dead, or he’d be reaching for his clay. Hell, his fingers are already itching for it.

But then Itachi says, very calmly, “I need your help.”

Deidara stops and stares at him, thrown. “The fuck? Why?”

“I have no desire to remain here,” Itachi says simply. “It’s a waste of my time.”

“You’re _dead_,” Deidara explains carefully. Itachi had always seemed relatively… sane, as much as someone who had killed their entire clan could seem. Methodical, logical, ice cold. But he’s clearly crazy; Deidara should know. You don’t just get tired of being dead and decide to stop being dead. You’re dead.

Sure, Yomi is a depressing place, full of swirling shadows and ceaseless gloom; a dark, inverted world, populated with the afterimages of all that they’d known in life, by people whose souls are tarnished, impure. Nothing truly exists here but the damned and their old, sad memories. It could honestly be worse, but there’s still no getting out. This is it. This is their life now. Their un-life.

“I have unfinished business with the living.”

Deidara snorts. Oh, _that_. Even he knows what that means.

“Must really piss you off that he killed you, yeah? I bet you weren’t counting on that.”

Itachi’s expression doesn’t change. “A disappointment we both share, I’m sure,” he says, with a wry twist to his voice that makes Deidara want to pull his spine out through his throat.

He tongues his teeth—all three sets. “Fuck you! And why the fuck should I care about your unfinished business, anyway? I don’t give a shit about your stupid brother. I want him _dead._”

“Naturally,” says Itachi patiently. Deidara twitches. “That’s why I came to you. We share a goal.”

Deidara stares at him, incredulous.

“What? Are you saying you want to team up to take him down?” His lips pull back into a wide, delighted grin. “You're actually serious. Okay. Say I do help you. Say we can escape. What’s to say I won’t just betray you right away? Try to send you back here right after, yeah? Then find Sasuke for myself?”

Itachi’s cursed eyes gleam. “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

Deidara considers it. Itachi is hard to read at the best of times, but he definitely doesn’t seem like he’s fucking around.

And, the truth is, Deidara has thought about getting his revenge on Sasuke every gods-forsaken day he’s been down here. He wants, _needs_, a second go at him. He wants to murder that little shit. Pop his eyes out and burst them like ripe grapes. So. Yeah. Yeah, given the opportunity, he’s going to track him down and end him, destroy him, reach down to his very molecules and blow him apart. Make him respect his art. And sure, he’ll just turn up in Yomi like the rest of them, but Deidara doesn’t care—_he’ll_ be the one to have killed him.

He’ll have erased at least one set of those eyes from the world. If it can’t be Itachi, then it’ll have to be Sasuke.

And if he can find some of his old clay up there… the real stuff… if he can manipulate it… yeah. Yeah, he can do it. First, he’ll send Itachi back here, erase him from the physical plane, and then he’ll kill his little bastard brother himself. Somehow.

“Okay,” he drawls. “You got my attention. So what do you need me for?”

“In the land of the living, your art shook the very foundations of reality. It ripped atoms apart, disrupted the living chakra of the world itself. With enough concentrated firepower from you, and enough sustained chakra conversion from myself, we can manipulate the barrier between this plane and the next, and tear through.”

Well, it’s not the craziest thing he’s ever heard, but it’s definitely the craziest thing he’s heard come out of Itachi’s mouth. But… if he’s right…

“Even if we can break out of here, how’re we gonna _exist_ up there? I’m in a million tiny pieces, and you’re probably rotting in a shallow grave somewhere, thanks to your shitty brat of a brother.”

Itachi blinks slowly at him, unperturbed. “Our physical bodies cannot be recovered, true, but our chakra, our energy, our spirits, will persist, just as they do here. We simply need to shift them to the correct plane.”

“What, like ghosts?”

“Yes, like ghosts.”

Deidara laughs. “You sound pretty fucking confident for a dead guy.”

“I have nothing to lose,” Itachi says, with a creepy little smile that makes Deidara’s skin prickle into goosebumps. “And being dead may work to our advantage; physical limitations no longer truly apply to us. If we fail, then our spirits will simply return here, to the plane to which they are anchored. But once we set foot in the physical world… the strength of our conviction should be enough to sustain us.”

Yeah. Yeah, he’s seeing it now. They’ll be like vengeful yuurei, the ones who haunt the hell out of people until they’ve resolved whatever bullshit that prevented them from passing on.

But Deidara wants to do more than haunt. He wants to destroy.

“An Uchiha needs my help. From me. From _my_ art.” It’s too good. Too perfect.

Yeah.

“Well,” he says, sitting up and swinging his legs over the shadowy rock outcropping he’d been sitting on. “Even if you’re a piss-poor audience, I can’t say no to an art demonstration, can I? How’re we doing this?”

Turns out, all it takes is a door.

The door in question is a gigantic ball of clay, which Deidara has infused with copious amounts of carefully converted Yang chakra. This, when detonated—as Itachi tells him—will upset and negate the pure Yin the world of Yomi is made of. Like an explosion underwater, this will push away the Yin and create a pocket of Yang from the physical world; something to fill the abrupt void. The fundamental imbalance of energies will weaken the barrier between the planes, like wet rice paper, and Itachi’s modified, ever-burning, chakra-eating Amaterasu will tear it apart and hold it open for the amount of time it will take to slip through. But they’ll have to pass through the eternal fire, through the explosion itself. And it’s gonna hurt like a bitch.

Deidara’s not exactly looking forward to that part, but—how bad can it be, really? When he'd died, he’d set off a detonation inside his very heart; he’d torn himself to pieces for his art. This’ll be a piece of cake.

And it’s going to be beautiful.

“Remember,” Itachi tells him, his voice a low, calm rumble. “Displace as much Yin chakra as possible.”

“Big explosion, got it,” Deidara says, feeling himself tremble in excitement. A literal hole in the world; a smoking wound. “Yeah. Let’s do this.”

He claps his hands together into the seal. _Katsu._ His floating planetoid of clay begins to bubble and balloon outward, and then—

There is pain. Burning, awful, wonderful, _transcendent._

And then they’re through.

The yawning, flaming black hole in the world they’d created snaps to nothing behind him. Deidara falls to the ground. He can see the dirt through his hands. Hazy, transparent. Blurred at the edges. His palm-tongues taste it ineffectually, the teeth not quite able to chew it, but it’s _dirt_, it’s real, solid, sun-warmed earth. He laughs. With a thought, the melted skin of his arms is already smoothing over, returning to form. He can mold himself just like he molds his clay; he has mastery over himself once more, the artist at his easel, the world his canvas. His fucking oyster.

“I can’t believe that actually worked,” he says, and looks over at Itachi.

Who looks back at him, red eyes bleeding, spinning, and immediately rips apart into a hundred shrieking crows.

Deidara’s grin drops from his face. He tries to dispel the genjutsu, furious, but it’s not a genjutsu: just like Deidara had molded himself back to form, Itachi had simply, willfully dispersed. Gone. Now flying somewhere else—to his brother.

Deidara shoots to his feet and screams in wordless rage. He feels so much lighter than he’s used to, relieved of the physical weight of a human body, so much freer. The grass beneath his feet wilts and dies, scorched.

He looks down. The mouths in his palms have widened into red gashes; the teeth sharper, the tongues blackened and curling. They grin back up at him, and he can feel the fourth set of teeth grow long in his heart.

“You’re fucking dead,” he promises the patch of space Itachi had once inhabited.

But of course he is. They both are. And soon, Uchiha Sasuke will join them.


End file.
